


Three Days Late

by WriteDreamLie



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: A sneaky sabbotage, An attempted party, Belated Anniversary, F/M, No fury like a fairy princess thwarted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 15:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6013816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriteDreamLie/pseuds/WriteDreamLie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bog isn't around for his anniversary with Marianne. Dawn decides to do something about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Days Late

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Strange Magic One-Year Anniversary! Much lofe to this fandom!

“What do you mean he won’t be back in time?”

“Exactly what I said, Dawn.”

Marianne put her head down on top of her crossed arms. She had been leaning on the windowsill in her room for so long, she could feel the grooves of the wood being imprinted on her skin.

“But… today’s your…”

Without looking back into her room, Marianne could tell Dawn was shuffling. The elder sister shrugged as best she could from her position. Her wings felt heavy with the motion.

“I know. And he knows. But some things are more important that anniversaries.”

The shuffling stopped, and a moment later the sound of a resounding stomp— _How does such a small fairy make such a big noise?_ —echoed through the room instead.

“That’s so mean of him!” Dawn whined. “What’s so important that he had to be gone today?”

“Ah, just talk of a coup brewing in the Eastern half of the forest,” Marianne said with as much sarcasm as she could muster. “Nothing that important.”

She heard the door slide open, and thought for a moment that Dawn had given up and left. But a moment later, she heard a deep sigh.

“Yeah, I guess I can’t argue with that,” Dawn admitted. There was more shuffling.

Marianne readjusted her arms, moving to new grooves in the wood to give the current ones a break.

“We knew we’d have to do stuff like this sometimes. Comes with being a king.” Marianne knew that. She did. But she certainly wasn’t happy about it. As much as she liked to say she hated those lovey-dovey things, Marianne really had sort of wanted to at least _be with_ Bog for the day. And she certainly wasn’t moping about it. Not at all. She was just staring intently at the Dark Forest through her window, willing the rowdy goblins in the Eastern half of the forest to simultaneously fall into a pit…

“Psst…”

Marianne rolled her eyes and pushed away from the window, ready to reassure her sister that she was fine. Instead the turned around, wide smile at the ready, to find Dawn frantically signaling Sunny, who was leaning halfway into the room through the cracked door, his arms frozen in mid-air in their own frantic signal.

As soon as Sunny’s eyes met Marianne’s, Dawn stopped her signals and turned back around with her own faux smile.

“Did I… miss the dance party?” Marianne asked, crossing her arms.

“No!” the other two said in unison, their arms flailing upwards again.

“Excellent,” said the older princess with a smirk. “Then there’s still time for you to tell me what’s going on here?”

She said it to both of them, but looked straight at Sunny at the end. He was more likely to spill the beans than her devious little sister. Sunny’s mouth twisted shut and his cheeks puffed out a bit as if he had to physically restrain the answer from slipping out on its own. But before he could give in, Dawn jumped to his rescue.

“I forgot! We had a—um, plans today?” Dawn glanced at Sunny as if for reassurance.

The elf, to his credit, managed to keep his silence intact as he nodded slowly. Marianne raised an eyebrow at that. Did her sister really think this act was the least bit convincing? But asking for an explanation, she knew from experience, would get her nowhere.

“Oh,” she said, looking down at the floor sadly. “I guess I shouldn’t keep you then.” Marianne wrapped her arms tighter around herself and glanced back up at Dawn with what she hoped was a convincingly disappointed half smile.

Dawn, to _her_ credit, did not blurt out the truth the moment Marianne’s eyes met hers. She did, however, rush to hug her older sister so tightly it almost hurt.

“We will be back soon,” Dawn said firmly. “Promise.”

A second later, Marianne was alone in the room again, both extremely guilty looking parties having darted out the door, slamming it behind them.

Marianne shook her head and walked to the door. After a few seconds, she leaned on it very slowly so it wouldn’t budge and the two on the other side of the door wouldn’t hear her.

“What is it, Sunny?”

Dawn hadn’t even bothered to move away from the door. She may have, in fact, been leaning on it on the other side. Sunny was stealthier, but clearly not willing to be far from Dawn, as Marianne could hear him even more clearly.

“It’s Stuff and Thang, they wanted to see you. Said something went wrong with… the thing.”

The thing? Oh goodness. There was a thing.

Dawn was definitely leaning on the door, Marianne decided; she heard the curly hair brush across the door as her younger sister shook her head.

“No way, the job I gave them was the easiest! What could have gone wrong? Was something up with the flowers?”

Marianne immediately began imagining her sister trying to put on a goblin ball. All of the bulkiest and slimiest of Bog’s subjects covered in fairy-made vests and skirts, dancing to the most upbeat elf songs they could find… She had to cover her mouth to avoid giggling, and she very nearly missed the next thing Sunny said.

“No, they said… they said there was something wrong with the castle. Like, everything was on fire!”

“On fire?!” Dawn threw herself against the door, knocking into Marianne’s ear.

The combination of the words and the physical jolt took her a few seconds to recover from. She stood in the middle of her room, rubbing at her ear and imaging Bog’s new castle up in flames…

Wait a minute…

She rushed back to the window and looked across the green expanse between her castle and the border to the Dark Forest. Bog’s new castle was much closer to the border than the last one, so surely if it was ON FIRE she would be able to see flames or smoke or…

Nothing. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She nearly discounted Sunny’s words—Thang was notorious at miss-reporting messages—until she saw the flash of red. It was just the slightest blip, could have even been a brightly-colored beetle catching the light of the now setting sun just right. But in her frazzled state, it was enough.

She rocketed out the window, ignoring the cries of her sister who had apparently just re-entered the room behind her.

Marianne’s mind bounced back and forth between panic and betrayal. Bog’s castle was on fire… and Dawn wanted to hide that from her? But she could deal with that later, once she’d made sure everyone was okay… and man would she deal with it.

As she approached the castle, she pulled out her new sword. The one she’d lost in the previous castle’s demise couldn’t be recovered, but this one was almost twice as fine. It couldn’t put out fires, of course, but it could certainly do a number on whomever had set them. What if it was the Eastern goblins? What if they’d been trying to lure Bog away so they could have free reign to destroy his new home?

Well, they weren’t doing a very good job of it so far. Marianne didn’t see any flames on the outside of the castle, but another flash of red passed through the window that led to the throne room. Whoever the culprits were, they were still in the process of setting the fire.

She rocketed through the window, sword aloft, screaming, the only warning she would be giving the delinquent goblins—

—and barely managed to swerve as Griselda, arms full of blue streamers, appeared in front of her with an equally piercing scream.

Marianne rolled to the side, dropping the sword and tucking her wings in as she hit the floor.

“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Griselda demanded as soon as Marianne had landed.

Marianne managed to sit up and face Griselda, who had dropped the streamers into a messy pile at her feet.

“I was…” She glanced around at the definitely-not-on-fire castle. “Putting out the fire?”

Griselda threw her hands in the air with a growl. “I send those two off with one job and they bring back the wrong princess. Useless.”

“Um, what?”

Griselda didn’t answer. Instead, she gathered up the tangled bundle of thin blue strands and stomped over to one of the walls. Marianne took a moment to admire the new throne room: wider and taller than the last one, this one was lit by chandeliers made of the same fluorescent bulbs Bog had shown her a year ago. A year ago today. Sitting in the throne room, now that she knew it wasn’t in danger, Marianne noticed just how Bog-less it was. It wouldn’t stay that way long, hopefully, but still…

“Since you’re here now,” Griselda interrupted her train of thought, “you can try and explain this to me.”

Marianne looked up to watch Griselda set the streamers back down, rip a strip off the end of one, and stick it to the wall.

“That’s, um, very nice?” Marianne offered.

Griselda just continued to stare at the strip of blue hanging on the dark wood wall. A second later, embers spread down the strip from where it was attached to the wall, and in no time it had turned to dust. Griselda turned back to Marianne with raised eyebrows.

Marianne responded with a similar facial expression, and an additional dropped jaw.

“Is… is that what I was seeing through the window? Your decorations just spontaneously combusting?”

Griselda nodded, kicking her pile of streamers a little farther away from the wall.

“We can’t figure out what’s causing it. It’s nothin’ magical, I can tell ya that. But it’s everywhere in this room!”

“Not the throne, actually!” volunteered Thang. He scuttled into the room, smiling proudly as if this information had saved the day. Stuff met Griselda’s eyes as she came in behind Thang and immediately looked sorry.

“We did find Miss Dawn first, in our defense,” she said.

Dawn stomped in next, dragging Sunny behind her. As soon as they were through the door, she let go of his hand and flew the rest of the way to Marianne.

“What were you thinking?” She took Marianne by the shoulders and pulled her closer. “You couldn’t just wait five seconds for me to explain?”

_Time to deal with it then,_ thought Marianne, switching immediately back to betrayal mode.

“What do you mean what was I thinking? You were talking about the castle being on fire! And you thought I’d just sit back and wait for you to tell me on your own time?”

“Yes!” Dawn said firmly. Then she looked away, biting her lip. “No? Well, I mean, you didn’t have to run off!”

“Well I wasn’t going to do nothing!”

“You could have not eavesdropped!”

“You could have been stealthier!”

“Ahem?”

Both princesses looked down to see Thang holding the handle of Marianne’s sword up in offering. He was glancing between the two of them as if unsure of who would be taking the weapon.

In the end it was Marianne, shaking Dawn's hands off and immediately sheathing the sword. She took a few more seconds to close her eyes and breathe before turning back to her sister.

“Okay, the castle’s not on fire, so we’ll set that aside. For now.” She looked from Dawn to Sunny, still standing by himself at the entrance to the throne room, and back again. “So, do you want to tell me what you were doing with all the decorations that are apparently going up in flames?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Dawn, all anger forgotten and replaced with her usual wide-eyed concern.

“Not to this one, I wouldn’t expect,” piped in Griselda. She took Marianne’s hand with one of her own and patted it with the other. “We were planning an anniversary party for ya, sweet pea.”

“Um…” Marianne didn’t know how to respond to that. Or to Griselda, who was keeping an oddly tight grip on her hand. “Uh, without Bog?”

“Psh, yes, without him,” replied Griselda. “I told him he could have waited one more day, those goblins couldn’t put together a proper coup if they tried.”

“So we were going to have a party ourselves, to cheer you up!” said Dawn. “But then the decorations started catching fire left and right.”

Stuff walked to the throne, which had been recovered mostly intact from the debris, and pulled a basket half full of dark blue flowers into view.

“Aw yeah,” said Griselda with a sigh. “We lost most o’ them. Kinda went up in a pile all at once.”

Marianne frowned. She recognized the flowers as the type Bog had picked for her once upon a time. He must have told his mom about it—or more likely she nagged the information out of him. It upset her to think of them on fire…

Speaking of which...

Marianne gently took her hand back from Griselda and turned the wall where she’d just seen the bit of streamer burn away. It hadn’t been a trick of the light, and like Griselda said, it didn’t feel like any kind of magic. At a loss for anything else to do, Marianne closed one eye and leaned the other as close to the grain of the wood as she could.

Her vision blurred as her eye focused, and when it cleared she almost laughed.

No, it wasn’t magic. It was fire mites. Smaller than even the termites that were likely to have lived in Bog’s old castle, the fire mites could hide in the smallest grains in wood. Of course they had a natural way to coat their new home so it would be immune to the heat the tiny insects gave off. But anything else stuck to the wall too long was fair game.

Marianne almost laughed out loud, but she managed to stifle the urge. If Griselda didn’t know about the mites, it was likely that Bog had brought them here without telling her, probably precisely so they could stop her doing things like this. She pulled away from the wall with a shrug.

“I don’t know, you guys. That is really weird.” She looked down at the bundle of streamers at her feet, then over to the last of the flowers in the basket. “You know, I think it really would be better to save this stuff until Bog gets back…”

-

It took Bog another three days to make it home. He was tired, having spent a good portion of that time beating the snot out of a band of renegade goblins. Coup indeed; they’d hardly been a club, and they weren’t even that now. But it was a long trip, and Bog had insisted upon flying back as soon as he was sure this little problem was going to stay little.

He wanted to get home to his new castle, and of course to Marianne. He’d felt awful about leaving when he had. What kind of terrible timing was it to have to rush off right before their anniversary? But, he reasoned, it would have been an entirely different kind of awful had the rumors of a coup been true and Marianne had been put in any danger because of him…

He shook the thoughts away. He was nearly there now, and he’d sent word back through the mushrooms, so hopefully Stuff and Thang had told everyone who wasn’t Marianne to shove off. He would need a day or two at least to recover from this mess, and Marianne was the only one he wanted to see then.

He could have dropped right out of the sky he was so relieved when the castle finally came into view. It was taller and wider than his last one, to accommodate the new list of visitors he now had coming by pretty regularly. Of course, he’d still insisted upon a sort of skull for the entrance. Tradition was tradition, after all. But Bog decided, on a whim, to veer in through the window that led to his throne room instead of using the door. What was the point of being a king if you couldn’t surprise people by flying in windows now and then?

However, it was Bog who was surprised when he entered the room to find not Stuff and Thang as he’d expected, but Marianne perched on his throne. She was sitting sideways, her back propped up on one armrest and her legs hanging over the other. The throne itself was wrapped in blue, and there were matching blue flowers stuck in Marianne’s hair.

“Hey you,” she said, kicking her feet.

“Ah, hey,” he replied eloquently. After a quick glance around the room to see that they were alone, Bog walked to the side of the throne and leaned his staff against the back of it.

Marianne immediately stood and leaned over the back of the throne. With the added height, she was just about tall enough to look him in the eyes.

“You missed our anniversary, you know.” She pouted, bottom lip jutting out and all.

Bog smiled at the faux sadness. “I know, luv. But ya know I wouldn’a have gone if it weren’ important.”

Marianne sighed dramatically. “I suppose so! I wasn’t actually the one most upset about the whole thing.”

“Oh yeah?” Bog asked flatly. “And how did my mother deal with the great tragedy that is her son?”

“Oh, she was pretty tame,” said Marianne, turning around and flopping back into the throne.

Bog stepped around it, meaning to scoop her up and set her on his lap, but she was out of the seat and in the air before he could reach her.

“You should have seen my sister,” she said, fluttering up and away from him.

Bog was about to ask her to come back down—his wings were so tired, he wasn’t sure he had the energy to go after her right now—when he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. He barely had time to duck as three acorns came flying at his head in quick succession.

Surprised and not the least bit amused, he flung himself into the seat of the throne, peaking over it as Marianne had just been doing, searching the room for the attacker. But he needn’t have bothered looking; she came out just then on her own.

“I can’t believe you!” yelled Dawn, chucking another acorn at the exposed part of Bog’s face. He ducked again, and the projectile bounced harmlessly off of his staff, still resting on the back of the throne.

Bog thought to grab for it, but wasn’t quite quick enough; Dawn flew right above him with more acorns in tow. He rolled off the chair and away from the onslaught.

“What the devil do ya think you’re doin’?”

“Avenging my sister!” Dawn dove to the ground, collected her ammunition, and took to the air again. “You abandoned her on your anniversary! And I won’t stand for it!”

Bog found he also couldn’t stand, though it was definitely due more to fatigue and shock than anything else.

“Marianne, what’s wrong with her?” In lieu of standing, Bog scooted backwards, putting at least a little more distance between himself and the crazy acorn-wielding fairy princess.

“I told you she was upset,” Marianne answered from just above him.

Bog looked up in time to see her shrug. Then he looked back at Dawn, who was already winding up for another attack.

“Marianne, please…” Bog shook his wings to see if they had the least bit of energy left in them. They didn’t.

“What, you’re scared of my baby sister?” Marianne glided back over to the window from which Bog had entered and was now hopelessly far away from. “You know I’d help if it was really important.”

That tore it. He was doomed.

-

“You could have waited—“

“They were threatenin’ my rule—“

“Even your mother said—“

“My mum says a lot of things—“

“I heard that, young man!”

Marianne didn’t bother to stifle the laughter this time. From her perch on the windowsill, she watched as Dawn continued to pelt Bog with the same few acorns. Bog rolled away as much as possible—he must have been really tired if he couldn’t fly away from this—but Dawn’s aim was getting better. Griselda had taken her spot on the throne to spectate and do commentary. Stuff was holding Thang back from helping, for his own sake of course.

Maybe it was a little harsh, but really tradition was tradition, and how could they celebrate this particular day without a fairy-princess-on-Bog King battle? Besides, now she had even more reason to make it up to him later.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Critique is welcome :3


End file.
